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From: hartnegg@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de (Klaus Hartnegg)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: Power on passwords
Message-ID: <1990Nov4.133347.2898@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de>
Date: 4 Nov 90 13:33:47 GMT
References: <1990Oct29.143729.20757@cck.cov.ac.uk> <1990Nov1.095550.20235@santra.uucp>
Reply-To: HAKL@ibm.ruf.uni-freiburg.de
Organization: Rechenzentrum der Universitaet Freiburg, Deutschland
Lines: 30

c37189h@saha.hut.fi (Harri "Haba" Suomalainen) writes:

>If you really gotta write the program you could make it as a part of boot
>by locating it in boot sector, autoexec.bat etc. This program should check
>the valid password and then eg. decrypt your FAT (the part of it not needed
>in boot-up). It sure is hard to do!

OH NO NO NO! Never encrypt the FAT unless you want to get into really
big trouble! You could encrypt the partition table but you should
never encrypt the FAT.

When ever happens anything to your hard disk and you want to use
a disk editor to repair it (Norton's NU or NDD for example)
then you have no chance to get your information back when the
FAT was encrypted. Its much easier to restore a partition table than a FAT!

Of course that also means that you will never have perfect
security: it's always possible to bypass such a password
protection by guessing what the partition table may have been.

As long as there is no file encryption built in the operating
system you will NEVER have perfect security: either a possible
cracker can bypass the password or your data lives very dangerous.

-- 
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Klaus Hartnegg, Kleist-Str. 7, D-7835 Teningen, Tel 07641/48652
BITNET   : HAKL@DFRRUF1
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